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Summary

The future of curatorial practice: how education, research, and institutions can adapt to the expansion of the curatorial field.

Today curators are sometimes more famous than the artists whose work they curate, and curatorship involves more than choosing objects for an exhibition. The expansion of the curatorial field in recent decades has raised questions about exhibition-making itself and the politics of production, display, and distribution. The Curatorial Conundrum looks at the burgeoning field of curatorship and tries to imagine its future. Indeed, practitioners and theorists consider a variety of futures: the future of curatorial education; the future of curatorial research; the future of curatorial and artistic practice; and the institutions that will make these other futures possible.

The contributors examine the proliferation of graduate programs in curatorial studies over the last twenty years, and consider what can be taught without giving up what is precisely curatorial, within the ever-expanding parameters of curatorial practice in recent times. They discuss curating as collaborative research, asking what happens when exhibition operates as a mode of research in its own right. They explore curatorial practice as an exercise in questioning the world around us; and they speculate about what it will take to build new, innovative, and progressive curatorial research institutions.

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Editors

Paul O'Neill

Paul O'Neill, an artist, curator, educator, and writer, is Artistic Director of Publics, Helsinki, and the author of The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture (MIT Press). He is coeditor of The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice? and How Institutions Think (both published by the MIT Press).

Mick Wilson

Mick Wilson is an artist, educator, and researcher based in Sweden and Ireland and coeditor of The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice? and How Institutions Think (both published by the MIT Press).

Lucy Steeds

Lucy Steeds is Reader in Art Theory and Exhibition History at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. She is coeditor of The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice? and How Institutions Think (both published by the MIT Press).